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Dec 01, 2006

The History of Virtual Worlds

I'm going for a first-time event here: a triple cross-post at Easily Distracted, Cliopatria and Terra Nova. I'm at a meeting on law and virtual worlds at the New York Law School, and there's a really interesting panel discussion of methodologies in virtual worlds. Douglas Thomas just pointed out that when we talk about qualitative methods in virtual world research, we always tend to define that as ethnography, when there are other kinds of qualitative methods that are potentially important, including history.

I think that's right, and it struck me how odd it is that I, as a historian, generally talk about virtual worlds methodology in terms of my habitual dissatisfaction with the tendency of anthropology to visit its own ethical obsessions on all discussions of ethnography as a method. I don't talk about historical narratives or events in virtual worlds, even though what I think is most interesting about virtual worlds is that they are historical, processual, dynamic, iterative.

So what are the methodological challenges of tracing events and processes over time in virtual worlds? Well, part of the problem is that some of the richest quantitative or empirical kinds of data imaginable have been until very recently held privately by developers. Star Wars: Galaxies extensively tracked the history of the construction of housing within their gameworld, but without access to the developer's data, the only systematic conclusions you can make about that process depend upon personal (or pooled) observations and reports. A historian of virtual worlds to date would need to have been there to say much of anything about many of the structural histories of importance.

But this is even true for a narrative of events within games. If a 25-year old graduate student came to me and said, "I want to write about the history of events within Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, about the narrative evolution of the games, about key episodic things that happened", I'd pretty much say that this graduate student is in a worse situation than a historian of modern Africa. The textual sources are going to be extremely difficult to recover in a thorough way because there are both too many and too few; a lot of the rest will only be knowable through oral historical work, or through questioning people through email. I know about Dread Lord Days, and about the way Arwic was in Asheron's Call before secure trading was introduced, and about about Sunny in LambdaMOO and so on. I know about the fetuspult in Dawn. I was there for it all. So I could write that history as an eyewitness, from the perspective of experience. Of course, I could add some sustained archival research, because I know to use keywords like "fetuspult" and "Arwic".

I had a discussion earlier today about a parallel problem in simulations of emergent phenomena, which also seem deeply historical and processual by their nature. It seems to me that knowledge production around such simulations often requires experience, you have to watch a simulation again and again to begin to understand the range of variability in its evolution over time.

So I'm powerfully convinced that the history of any given virtual world, and the history of all virtual worlds, is a crucial part of knowing them in qualitative sense. But I'm also struck that this is actually harder to know than the already-difficult methodological challenges of my major field of specialization, African history, and for various reasons is also harder to know than the general history of online and new media, which are archived in ways that experience and events in virtual worlds is not.

Comments

1.

Not to mention the fact that Blizzard, for example, is very protective of certain kinds of data. For example the terms of service for WoW specify that users shall not "use any third-party software that intercepts, "mines, or otherwise collects information from or through World of Warcraft;..."

I suppose that may be analogous to a state's restricting access to documents, archeological sites, etc.

Personally, what I wish I had my hands on was a historical metanarrative of all virtual worlds. It would be an outstanding resource for looking at both micro and macro events currently, and in terms of projecting potential short and long term directions.

I'd LOVE to collect historical data on the game, and share that data. The question is how? What data do I log, in what format, that will automatically provide a clear picture of the narrative of my MMO five years from now? I can, and probably will, wind up logging everything anyway, but does anyone have a clear idea of what data I should track, to produce this history?

An associated question is, what data do I NOT release, to keep my community (or individual players) from getting upset with me?

From a historical perspective, Thom, the main factor is time... I'm sure people didn't think that what they threw into their waste piles was worth anything at the time (and maybe they'd be appalled that you'd want to go through their garbage) but now, the shell middens are a rich source of historical and archeological data about early human populations.

History is so gloriously unpredictable that way. One can study just about anything.

Timothy, I was given this URL by Jerry Paffendorf of Electric Sheep/Metaverse worlds. I would like to offer you a report on work I have commenced to create a comprehensive timeline of artifacts on the history of Social Virtual Worlds (SVWs). Ten years ago I wrote the first book on the medium called "Avatars" and followed with many other publications about the 1990s wave of social spaces (Worlds chat, Alphaworld, The Palace, Blaxxun, WorldsAway, etc) and held the first conferences on the medium. Most of this work was done under the auspices of an organization called the Contact Consortium, which was established in 1995 by myself, an anthropologist and a science fiction writer (a good combination for late night conversation if there ever was one).

To mark the tenth anniversary of the original Earth to Avatars conference, our team in California started to digitize all the video taken of that and later events and this has grown to over 3000 hours of material. As we spread the word about this effort, a large set of contributions chronicling the birth and evolution virtual world Cyberspace began to stream in from the original inhabitants of the spaces, employees and developers from the original companies, and the designers and artists who crafted the first avatars and worlds. I am currently talking with several universities about creating an academic home for the effort (with attendant heavy technical lifting). We are looking at building an open contribution (Wiki or other back end database) that can create a channel for the contribution of artifacts and other resources (such as expert curation) by the community at large. In addition I have started to give a series of lectures about the medium of social virtual worlds and about the project (recently at Linden Labs and Jerry's Metaverse meetup in New York City). The project now has a name and a domain: "Virtual Worlds Timeline: the Origins and Evolution of Social Virtual Worlds" housed at a new site at: http://www.vwtimeline.org>www.vwtimeline.org

The time span will commence at the first 3D shared virtual world, Maze War (1974), and take us through MUDs/MOOs through to the late 80s experiments with Habitat, thence to the first wave of Internet-based social worlds in the 90s and up to the present day, documenting the new platforms like Second Life. The project is focusing on social virtual worlds and not attempting (at this time) to include game play worlds. The project defines social virtual worlds as being spaces in which the primary activity is communication between users on topics of their own choosing (which may include building and gameplay as secondary activities). The project will first focus on the large scale collection of artifacts, followed by the development of a taxonomic classification, then curation and other analysis, and finally the building of a graphical scrollable timeline to permit researchers and the public to have easy access to the archive. All artifacts referencing the medium are being sought including: stories, imagery, chat logs, video of "in-world" and "real life" events, technology, artistry/objects, company materials, academic studies, etc.

I am thrilled to see virtual worlds history efforts being discussed in this blog (and some of the difficult issues pointed out by Timothy above) and I am keen to engage your community. Feel free to reach me at any time at bdamer at ccon dot org. If this is of interest to readers and they want to join the VWTimeline project please let me know.

Jane's first post points to what I think is odd thing about your take on this. Actually, it's far easier to get the data on *everything* happening in a virtual worlds and to keep it forever. That was the main point of the panel -- VWs give researchers new, unprecedented, ways to gather complex data about societies.

I'm not saying that this makes research any easier for a graduate student, though, but the point is not that the data on the society doesn't exist (it may not) but that it is proprietary. In fact, some of the comments to the panel suggested that there was some amount of new risk involved in the volume and power of the data being captured.

My personal reaction to the panel was that there should have been a textualist (someone from English or Communications) on the panel, because what we had on display were quantitative and qualitative methods of looking at societies. Virtual worlds are not by just societies mediated by technology, but societies structured by games and narratives. In order to have a full sense of what is happening in them (or their history), you have to talk about how they are texts and rule structures that are read and performed by the participants (in ways, I think, that are importantly different that what happens in offline society).

Greg, I think the one thing that *isn't* in the proprietary data is the history of unusual or defining episodes or events in the life of particular virtual worlds, exactly as you observed. The narrative history, the event history, of any given virtual world, may in fact be obscured by the kinds of god's-eye view data that developers have. After all, they often don't know what is happening at the subjective level of experience within communities, or have to react to it after it's happened. (Say, when players stage a protest.)

Despite the World of Warcraft terms of service, there are a number of sites available that track a tremendous amount of, if not qualitative, quantitative historical information. For example, there are sites that track demographic data, and there is a site that tracks the honor history of every character in the game. That's a tremendous amount of data, some of which would raise privacy concerns if it were about real people.

The qualitative, "oral" data is more of a problem. For one thing, the structure of most virtual worlds - each server is its own world with its own history, and some games have hundreds of servers - means that it can be difficult to extract very much in the way of broadly applicable history. The societies are too fragmented.

For an actual timeline of virtual worlds, I think the one Raph compiled with the help of others on the late MUD-Dev list is still by far the most comprehensive. Note however, that it ends in 2002 -- WoW had been announced but EQ and DAoC ruled the day -- so from today's perspective it could be called 'the history of virtual worlds, Part I.' It would be a worthy project for someone to pick that up and apply the same level of detail to all the changes that have come along int the past four years.

I think the data around the virtual economies would be very interesting to analyze.

But I'd imagine that a lot of other data elements would be either very particular to the gameplay - i.e. how many elves were created versus ogres in Everquest(is that interesting in and of itself?). Many of the chat logs would likewise make the AOL instant message rooms look Shakespearean by nature, i.e. ("You looted that dead corpse out of turn. Give it back!")

Don't forget there was a large virtual world community on the GEnie network during the early 90's that led to a large chunk of the more combat-oriented RPG/MMOG games from Cyberstrike and Airwarrior and GemStone through their descendents today.

Yes indeed and thanks Mike, FT, Timothy and others. I have contacted Ralph Koster about his truly excellent timeline and got a warm response so I hope he will be an excellent additional partner in this effort. Mike (Sellers) its great to be back in touch with you again, as I wanted to find a way to reach you.

Actually, as the only professional copy editor on the Terra Nova author roll, I'm going to make a command decision here and say that "fetuspult" is not only acceptable but preferable. Let's reserve "fetapult" for Dawn's cheese-launching siege engines.

Oh, and if anyone would like a look at other rulings from the Terra Nova Manual of Style, just meet me in the backchannel.

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Thanks for the nudge Richard,
Folks can we have a discussion of a definition of Virtual World? A text-based MUD is one right? A first person shooter? A chatroom? Second Life or Active Worlds? Better still, what is NOT a virtual world?

Well I may beg to differ about academics not being interested in VW/MUD history as this project is being supported by a half dozen (and growing) university researchers and labs...

That's good. :) Make sure you cover BSX LPMUDs, not just the 3D metaverses. I believe BSXs were the first graphical open source social MUDs on the "public" Internet. I have more info if you need it, including a copy of the original (somewhere).

I find the obsession with hard definitions a bit strange, as I've said elsewhere, but if in raising the issue we seek to develop a useful starting point for looking at any thing that might make sense to see as a virtual world, then I would say what I said in this thread (a good one to read next to this one):

If held at gunpoint and asked to define "virtual world"...If a domain is rich enough in possibilities that it can generate for its users a distinctive, reliable, and shared disposition about how to act within it, then "synthetic" (or, if you must, "virtual") "world" may be the most useful way to describe and analyze it. One of the clear advantages, in the context of the OP here, is that this makes no demands about graphics vs texts, but preserves the still significant differences between MySpace and a text MUD.

I'm not holding you at gunpoint. You're not creating a virtual world timeline involving "half a dozen university researchers and labs" without first having defined what you mean by the term "virtual world". You don't have to be precise. It's the rather vague foundations of this VW timeline that I'm wanting to see pinned down.

What has Maze War to do with games like World of Warcraft or Second Life? Where does it appear in their ancestral history? What influence did it have on any stage of their development? Putting it first in their timeline implies some causal relationship between the two, but what is that relationship? For "first" to mean anything here, Maze War would have to be the progenitor of virtual worlds in some sense. I'd like to know what that sense is.

If Maze War counts as a virtual world, we have (yet again) to think of another term that describes what used to be called MUDs, then MUGs, then MU*s, then MMORPGs, then MMOGs, then MMOs, then virtual worlds.

I think staying away from hard definitions is increasingly important. We're talking about a study on an industry/Genre that changes every 6 months to a year. 3 Years ago there were no Stealth Action Shooters, now there are. So we define virtual worlds as anything that allows the player to exsist in some space outside of the 'Real World' be it text based or graphical. Any more narrow of a definition will quickly get out dated.

Well, let's just go for a computer game timeline, then. Or just a game timeline. Or just a timeline.

The problem with timelines is that they imply connections that aren't always there. There was an unnamed game played on an osciloscope in the 1940s that is sometimes referred to as the "first video game", and OXO written in the 1950s is called the "first computer game"; the thing is, neither of those games had any influence on what followed. If you want the first game that has influences still felt today, your timeline should start with Spacewar!. I'd also say it should be a tree, not a line, but it depends what you want to use the timeline for.

>So we define virtual worlds as anything that allows the player to exsist in some space outside of the 'Real World' be it text based or graphical. Any more narrow of a definition will quickly get out dated.

So Dungeons & Dragons is a virtual world?

The kind of virtual world we talk about on this blog are the ones that are automated, shared, persistent environments with and through which people can interact in real time by means of a virtual self. That's quite a narrow definition, yet it refers to a particular, identifiable class of software product that is distinct in important ways from other kinds of worlds that don't exist, yet which has its own paradigms, its own traditions, its own theories and its own appeal. If you want to say that Doom is a virtual world, OK, well, as I said, that just means that those of us who research what I've described above need (yet again) to come up with a term that describes them all without either being too narrow or (as it seems may be happening here) too broad.

Thomas Malaby>I'd only add that articulating them [as you have now so powerfully] moves the conversation forward perhaps a bit more effectively than the straight-up, challenging question you offered before.

When I asked what definition of the term was being used for this timeline, that wasn't intended to be a challenge; rather, it was a simple request for a definition. There has to be a definition in a book entitled "Avatars! Exploring and building virtual worlds on the Internet", right? I just wanted to know what it is, so I could see what kind of things this timeline was intended to chronicle. My suspicion was (and is) that the timeline's definition of "virtual world" is much broader than the one we use here on Terra Nova.

Of course it is. A virtual world is simply an extention of the real world in a different medium. Lets compair the term Art. From wikipedia "Art is an application of human creativity that has some form of appreciative value, usually on the basis of aesthetic value or emotional impact. Much about art is controversial, including what specific cases can be considered such."

There has been some controversy over whether or not 3D Photorealism is concidered Art over the last 10 or so years. Yet I know as someone who comes from a digital art background, that my craft is definately an art. However, the arguement at it's core is based around not the definiton but around the Medium.

The same can be said about Virtual Worlds, the question is not about defining what one is. We've defined it over and over. "...persistent environments with and through which people can interact...by means of a virtual self. " DnD fits this description, as does WoW, as does MUD.

The arguement of whether or not something has an impact is false in my opinion. di Vinci may have had an impact on Art as we know it today, but what about the street vendor artist that may have had an impact on him. I don't know about any street vender in Italy hundreds of years ago, do you? Evolution of a science or an art is not about what effects the current but what had an effect at the time of its effect. This is the butterfly effect, where one small insignificant change may have a huge impact on the course of things. A Butterfly flying around your room at home would not make the local news, but the tornado that levels an entire city, which was caused in part by the little butterfly in your bedroom, would most definately. But chaos theorists don't study that effect linearly, they just understand that it is one. And create a starting point where the study becomes achievable. For example, we could say that the metabolism of the butterfly caused it to need to find food, so it flew, so the wind blew to some minute fraction, (10,000 steps in advance) a tornado apears and levels Winnipeg Manitoba. Now, no Meteorologist studies butterflies. He draws a point to where the study becomes understandable, concievable and definite.

By our definition, we can start the time line/tree at any point that the games have become persistant and multiplayer.

Now what part of those games that we study is where we can start to subcatagorize. In my opinion that study is too large. Studying certain Persistant Multiplayer games (or Virtual Worlds) is important. It would be an impossible task to try and understand all aspects of the field. This is like wondering why a specialist in Coral Reef's doesn't understand how Salt Water Glacial Microbes procreate, just because he's an oceanographer doesn't mean he understands every detail of what goes on in an ocean.

This group just has a good grip of whats going on in specific areas, but can not be expected to understand everything that is 'Virtual Worlds'.

Richard Bartle: There has to be a definition in a book entitled "Avatars! Exploring and building virtual worlds on the Internet", right?

I don't have the book at hand, as I aksed my library to buy it, but I belive it covers the same ground as ccon.org. That is: social non-game online interaction spaces where you can move in a virtual landscape.

(You already know my definition of virtual world... so no point in stating it. ;-)

Jesse:By our definition, we can start the time line/tree at any point that the games have become persistant and multiplayer.

Define "persistant".
Why is "persistant" important as a distinguishing factor? For what lines fo study is it important as a distinguishing factor?

Jesse:Now what part of those games that we study is where we can start to subcatagorize. In my opinion that study is too large. Studying certain Persistant Multiplayer games (or Virtual Worlds) is important.

Why? You need to know why before you come up with a useful definition for the objects you include.

I don't think this history will ever be very complete. The work in VRML exploded in the mid 90s and many viable works were lost. For example, Terra Nova was the name of an online building project of that time too. Ten years later, it gets picked up again for this page, so the originality of the thinking is questionable.

Koster says nothing important online is done with VRML. He has missed some significant contracts in for example, the public safety/homeland security space. He has missed the ABNet software. He can narrow his definitions in the fashion of academics who wish to be right but stay within the borders of the current pop culture, but historically, it will be fallacious. How this project avoids that kind of thinking remains to be seen if that is the credentials of the contributors.

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